‘‘We’re a little disappointed with what happened with the sculpture,’’ said Bonhams Maritime Art Department sales specialist Gregg K. Dietrich.

The sculpture’s owner, military historian and collector Rodney Hilton Brown, did not wish to discuss the results of the auction.

Dietrich said prospective buyers could purchase the sculpture through Bonhams.

History buffs have fawned over the sculpture, a smaller version of the 32-foot-tall bronze Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va. That sculpture, designed by Felix de Weldon, was patterned after a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press image of the Feb. 23, 1945, flag-raising by Marines and a Navy corpsman on Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi.

The smaller sculpture was largely forgotten for more than four decades after de Walden placed it in the back of his studio, covering it with a tarp. That’s where Brown found it in 1990 while researching a book on de Weldon. It was in desperate need of restoration.

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